Book-based impact is very important for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences disciplines. The number of libraries that hold an item, the number of patron holds on an item, and reviews of an item can be used as impact metrics. Visit the Metrics Toolkit to explore more metrics for the impact of books.
- For Springer Link Books A-Z, look for the Altmetric link on a book page which offers a free-to-access but limited selection of the activity collected by Altmetric. Registered Altmetric users will have full access to the details pages.
- Goodreads is a free social cataloging website with a user-populated database of books, annotations and reviews, which you can search. Plum Analytics has recently expanded its support for books to include Goodreads metrics including ratings, reviews and the number of readers.
- Ratings and reviews on Amazon can be used as metrics. For example, Plum Analytics includes the number of Amazon book reviews as an impact metric.
- Google Books has ratings and reviews which can be used as impact metrics. Additionally, on Google Books, you can search for citations to other publications within the full-text of digitized books. Research suggests that Google Book citations correlate significantly and positively with Web of Science citations.
- WorldCat is a free meta search engine for the online catalogs of libraries all over the world. The number of libraries that hold an item can be used as an impact metric. Research suggests that WorldCat holdings correlate significantly and positively with Web of Science citations.